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The Container brings refugee experience to harrowing life: review

By Clare Bayley, directed by Zachary Florence. Until Sept. 18 in the courtyard of the Berkeley Street Theatre, 26 Berkeley St. canadianstage.com or 416-368-3110

Little Omran Daqneesh, sitting dust-covered and shell-shocked after an Aleppo airstrike. The lifeless body of Alan Kurdi, washed up on a Turkish beach. More than 3,000 souls dead and missing this year alone as they, like Kurdi’s family, tried to reach Europe via the Mediterranean. Thirty-thousand-plus Syrians now resident in Canada since November 2015.

We hear about and see images of the global refugee crisis every day, so much that it’s possible to become inured. Theatre Fix’s The Container makes the crisis impossible to ignore.

It’s staged in a 6-metre shipping container; a maximum of 21 audience members are locked in with five actors playing refugees and another playing the Agent they’ve paid to get them to England.

Well, you’re not really locked in, of course. In a pre-show speech, an usher clearly sets out the fiction and rules of engagement: bottles of water are distributed, signals established for how to get out of the claustrophobic space if you need to. While characters talk about how much the container stinks and there is simulated use of a bucket toilet, this intensely environmental piece of theatre does not include smell effects.

In all other ways, though, the focus of the show (back after a hit run at the 2014 SummerWorks Festival) is on evoking the experience of illegal migration; bringing the subject, as playwright Clare Bayley says in a program note, back down to a human scale.

Fatima (Bola Aiyeola) and Asha (Ubah Guled) are Somalian; we’re initially told they’re mother and daughter. Ahmad (Victor Ertmanis) is a middle-aged Afghan, wealthier than the rest. Jemal (Adriano Sobretodo Jr.) is a Turkish Kurd who’s made several previous attempts at this journey.

It’s when Mariam (Lara Arabian), an Afghan teacher, is thrown into the container that the story begins. She confirms that they’re passing the Italian border into France, but much of the tension comes from the fact that, from this point on, no one, least of all the spectator, really knows the fictional location. Sound design (by Nick Carney) simulates movement and traffic, but is the truck really heading for Calais?

The play was first performed in Edinburgh in 2007 and received a number of international productions since. Strikingly, while Bayley, who is English, has updated the script for this run (changing a reference to Iraq to Syria, for example), she has kept the refugees’ destination as the U.K.

We still don’t know exactly how Brexit will affect Britain’s borders, but the play underlines how the country has long been the desired destination for so many displaced people. Jemal’s command to his fellow travellers — “We’re all Europeans now, speak in English” — resonates with irony at this particular historical moment.

Bayley includes much well-observed and compassionate detail. It’s particularly upsetting when 15-year-old Asha tells Mariam that she finds the container comforting because at least it’s a familiar environment, unlike the terrifying boat journey that brought her and Fatima across the Mediterranean. There is a stark focus on women’s experiences, in particular on how sex becomes a commodity in these extreme situations.

Zachary Florence’s otherwise assured production falters somewhat when it comes to the role of the Agent, played by Constantine Karzis; having him perform his first monologue as a sort of metaphorical riff on evil rather than in a state of extreme agitation about his situation jars in the otherwise hyper-naturalistic environment. At times, Karzis’s performance borders unfortunately on camp.

Sobretodo Jr. struggles to deliver the nuances of character that Jemal reveals late in the play, rendering one of the final peaks of tension not entirely credible.

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Among the other strong performances, Guled is a standout in her professional debut as Asha, and the deep emotion Aiyeloa calls up as Fatima’s self-deceptive dreams are overturned is credible and affecting.

So why go see a show like this? It might strike some as do-gooder masochism. For others, it’s a means of engaging with a real-life socio-political situation that could lead to action, which Theatre Fix is encouraging by bringing Amnesty International on board as community partner.

This is a harrowing opportunity to imagine, very viscerally, the experience of those who don’t share our Western freedoms and privileges. We can walk away from the container and all it represents. Many others can’t.

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